Congressional Oversight Committee

America's bailout program, which was intended to help U.S. banks, greatly helped foreign banks as well, a Congressional watchdog group has concluded. The American government flooded the financial markets with money, aiming to help as many banks as possible, while most foreign nations targeted funds to save individual institutions, often those with no major U.S. operations.

The Congressional Oversight Panel, created along with TARP, has issued a report taking Treasury to task for having "effectively no metric to determine whether [its] actions met its stated goals." Congress and the Fed should also get some blame.